reuters.com
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Chinese efforts to spy on the Dutch are intensifying, with the focus on semiconductors, Dutch Defence Minister Ruben Brekelmans said on Saturday.

“The semiconductor industry, which we are technologically leading, or technology advanced, of course, to get that intellectual property - that’s interesting to China,” Brekelmans said in an interview on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue security meeting in Singapore.

The Dutch military intelligence agency said in its annual report in April last year that Chinese spies have targeted the Dutch semiconductor, aerospace and maritime industries to try to strengthen China’s armed forces.

When asked if the spying had stopped, Brekelmans said: “It’s continuing. In our newest intelligence reports, our intelligence agency said that the biggest cyber threat is coming from China, and that we do see most cyber activity when it comes to us being as from China. That was the case last year, but that’s still the case. So we only see this intensifying.”

  • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
    42·
    4 days ago

    As if industrial espionage had never happened before.

    Honestly IP as in “secret technology” is harmful for the humanity.

    And in general all this understanding of civilization as, instead of duplicating everything, anarchy and competition, having some single benevolent owner of any part of it - stinks. Like - state of the art lithography is owned by ASML, and state of the art fabs are owned by TSMC, and computing is owned by a few companies we all know each a monopolist in its own layer or few, and as if everything should have a boss pretending to be nice and civilized.

    Stinks just as bad as mercantilism, state capitalism, Soviet idea of meritocracy (more bootlicking - more merit), yadda-yadda. It’s part of life that someone can capture the playing field wholesale, but that even in “nice” democratic EU countries like Netherlands the reliance upon modern versions of the Sound Toll is treated as normal just means that we need a new round of everything, the Hanseatic-Danish wars, the French revolution, everything.

    Humans have built for themselves a great generalizer, the electronic computer. So now the limited solutions of the problems of the past will have to be generalized for this bright new future as well. And when they do, I personally hope countries like Netherlands, among others, will not be left under the rubble.